X:Cel Superturn moving into enterprise zone

The £13m-turnover business is creating around 30 highly skilled engineering jobs with its move to a 10,000 sq ft state-of-the-art facility at Rotherham’s Advanced Manufacturing Park (AMP), which sits within the Enterprise Zone.

X:Cel Superturn is the first company to move into the zone and take advantage of Government incentives designed to boost sustainable employment and economic growth.

The company is expecting to benefit from business rate relief worth up to £275,000 over the next five years.

It is investing £500,000 in the factory and has placed an order for two new vertical computer controlled lathes from Sheffield machinery supplier TW Ward.

Andrew Taylor, managing director and owner, said: “I’m looking to expanding our operations to the AMP to meet the demands of this new contract.

“Many of our suppliers are based in the Sheffield City Region and there is a lot of technical expertise in the area so setting up our flagship operation at the Enterprise Zone was a no-brainer.”

The group will supply precision gaskets and sealing rings to an American multinational manufacturer of “Christmas trees”, an assembly of valves, spools and fittings for oil majors including BP and Shell to use in deep-sea operations.

The trees are attached to the top of subsea wells to control the flow of oil or gas.

Mr Taylor told the Yorkshire Post: “It’s all very high value-added complex manufacturing. It’s not just making nuts and bolts they can do out in China and India.

“Take the Gulf of Mexico disaster, if one of our components fails that’s the sort of consequences it has.

“It’s far more expensive than a plane crash nowadays. The parts have got to have very high integrity.”

X:Cel Superturn employs around 70 people at the moment. Mr Taylor said numbers would grow to around 100 with the new site at the AMP, Yorkshire’s flagship manufacturing centre. The new jobs will be for computer numerical controlled machinists and some computer-aided design programmers.

Sheffield Hallam University is supplying two engineering graduates who start work later this month.

Mr Taylor, who is 55, set up Sheffield Superturn in 1983, two years after completing a mechanical engineering degree at Huddersfield polytechnic.

He developed the business as a subcontract machine shop and maintained a competitive edge by investing in computer numerical controlled machinery, supplying to customers in the food, automotive, steel and petrochemical industries.

He acquired Leeds-based seals supplier X:CEL in 2007 with funding from The Royal Bank of Scotland.

The company has factories in Sheffield, Batley and Houston, Texas. Mr Taylor opened a sales office in the oil capital in 2009 and last year set up a manufacturing operation in the city, which although costly has reduced lead times with key customers.

“It’s like a roll call of the big oil and energy producers,” he said, describing a drive through Houston’s Oil Corridor.

But his main manufacturing operations remain in South Yorkshire.

Mr Taylor said UK manufacturing is doing very well. He added: “Quite a bit of work that was offshore is coming back. I think companies nowadays are much better managed than they were 10-15 years ago.

“People took their work a bit for granted. The attitude was ‘we are the best and we don’t have to work very hard at it’.

“People have realised you do have to. But if you do, you get the right results.”

In common with many other manufacturers, he said there is a shortage of skilled people in the labour market and his company has to train new recruits intensively.

“We look for intelligent people,” he said. “Traditionally in engineering you got the students who couldn’t do anything else.

“Now we need a more intelligent type of student. Schools and colleages are turning out better than they used to.”

Mr Taylor said the AMP is “very prestigious” and always creates a good impression with customers from overseas. Other tenants include Boeing, Dormer and Rolls-Royce. “We take them up there, show them around and it reassures them,” he added.

James Newman, chairman of the Sheffield City Region Local Enterprise Partnership, congratulated X:Cel Superturn on its big contract win and welcomed the creation of skilled engineering jobs.

He told the Yorkshire Post: “It’s exactly what we want. Hopefully if companies like that are prepared to come into the Enterprise Zone then that will encourage more and more to do exactly the same.”

Incentives include business rate relief, enhanced capital allowances and superfast broadband.